I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
“The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
“It has never been very easy for me to live, though I am always very happy—maybe because I want so much to… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
A foreign country can best be understood through its literature. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel.… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
“One afternoon Clairaut came over to me with a book in his hand: “Mademoiselle de Beauvoir,” he began, in an inquisitorial tone,… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
“Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
“The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
“In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is,… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
“You said something very true the other day: that for us, nudity begins with the face.” — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to. — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
“Magari mi troverai ridicola, ma mi disprezzerei se non osassi esserlo mai” — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it… — Simone de Beauvoir Copy Share Image
